


Nar-Shaddaa Rules

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-16 17:43:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5834848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a ship full of self-confessed traitors, liars and lowlives, who exactly can you trust? As if fending off the Sith, home-schooling acolytes and getting re-acquainted with the Force weren't enough to handle. LSFxAtton, retraces the main beats of KOTOR2 but hopefully not too slavishly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trust Issues - Peragus II Mining Facility

**Author's Note:**

> Curse you KOTOR2 for your great characters, deep themes, and rushed release. For all the gaps that the remarkable RCM filled in, it still feels like the romantic subplots had a lot missing. Here's my attempt to fill in the blanks.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Careena feels like a pawn, but she doesn't know who's players or even what the game is.

Plasma torch in hand, Careena jogged through empty corridors. Her legs were stiff and sore; in all of this confusion, one thing she _could_  believe was that she’d spent the last three days floating in kolto. So far, her leaden footfalls had brought no sentient attention, and that said something about what must have happened here. She stepped over body after body, wrecked droid after wrecked droid. A few mining mechs scuttled amid the carnage, but by the time their slow, almost lazy bolts tumbled past the Exile, she was already on them with her plasma torch. Even in her sluggish state, they presented no proper challenge. Careena had faced far deadlier foes, in far worse states.

With every room, she found the remains of more miners. There was a time when each corpse would have wounded her deeply. As she stepped over them, Careena would have sensed the ripple each death made in the Force; felt the bloom of grief and sorrow that would be visited on distant family, the anguish of far-flung lovers. Now, deaf to the Force, she felt nothing. Normal sadness, of course; regret for the loss of innocent life. But before Malachor, such sights would have ached like a raw sore, as exhausting and immediate as any physical wound.

The empty halls stretched on, yielding loading bays, offices, warehouses. As she got further from the medbay, the signs of struggle became more subtle: there were no more dead and no debris, but the walls bore the occasional streak from a stray plasma bolt, bootskids on the metal floor, lockers left askew. After a few minutes she came upon a security desk, its logins disabled by the lockdown protocol. Careena scrolled idly through some security holologs in the hopes of gathering clues. It all seemed to back up the old lady’s guesses. _If they were 'guesses' at all._ Careena and the old woman had been found on this _Ebon Hawk_  vessel, and someone had instantly pegged that there was a Jedi aboard. Doubt pricked at her on that point. It didn't take a Force user to spot something fishy, and Kreia's limited account of herself didn't add up.

After all, this bounty on Jedi... Kreia seemed quite sure that the conspirators were after Careena, but that made no sense. Careena Slonn had been off the map for ten long years, and she hadn't exactly been a household name before that. How would a bunch of miners on a backwater facility know who she was, who she'd been, or what she’d been? The old woman, on the other hand, was clearly powerful in the Force - Careena couldn't feel it any more, but she could recognise its mark on others. Every word, every gesture, every glance from Kreia screamed 'Force user'. She was openly familiar with the Jedi, and somehow she'd pegged Careena for an exile from the beginning. Yet Careena had never encountered this woman before, in all her time at the Academy or those darker years under Revan’s command. She remembered no master called Kreia among the rolls of the Jedi, nor any knight by that name among Revan's forces. And if ‘Kreia’ was an assumed name, that just raised a whole lot of other questions. Whatever Kreia's game was, their immediate priorities seemed to be pretty much aligned - so Careena's questions could wait.

The Exile rifled through the lockers in the security room, hoping to find a proper weapon, but she was disappointed. She moved back to the desk and activated the live security screens, flipping quickly between the feeds to scout out the rest of this level. Empty room, droids, empty hall, empty command deck, more droids, and then-

She paused over the feed from the holding cells, where a dark-haired man stood glumly in a force cage. He wore the heavy wrapped shirt and leather shell that was practically a uniform for the criminal class of the Outer Rim - if nothing else, it marked him out from the uniformed crew presently littering the rest of the vessel. With the discipline born of long obedience, Careena powered down the security desk down, set aside her curiosity and got back to the mission. But despite his inauspicious appearance, the scoundrel in the brig was that most precious thing in a disaster like this. _Another survivor._

* * *

With a tap on the command panel, the damaged mining units slumped into standby mode and Careena became aware of another change - the texture of the bridge’s ambient noise had softened, missing the fizz of a force barrier nearby. She turned to see a security seal spin at the far end of the command floor. _Holding cells_ , she guessed. She scouted the docking ramps adjoining the admin floor, and when she was satisfied that they were clear, she crossed back towards the unlocked door.

Kreia’s voice echoed in her mind again. _“Beyond this door, someone yet lives. His thoughts are… difficult to read. But you have nothing to fear from this one, and he might yet prove useful.”_

It didn’t escape Careena's notice that Kreia only seemed interested in their fellow survivor if he could be “useful” - nor that she was probing his actual _thoughts_ rather just the tone he sounded in the Force. It didn’t seem like a very Jedi approach. All the same, Careena relaxed a little. She activated the unlocked door, and the man turned towards the activity.

“ _Nice_ outfit,” he drawled. “What, you miners change regulation uniforms while I’ve been in here?”


	2. Useful - Peragus II Mining Facility

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Careena can't definitely trust anyone on this damn station, probably not even the astromech droid.

Without a live audience, it had been easy to forget she was running around in nothing but a slip and some plimsolls. Careena rolled her eyes anyway. For her own part, she sized him up. He'd just implied he was no miner, which fit with the outfit. But while his clothes said Outer Rim, his accent said Core. _Where in space have you ended up this time, Careena?_

“I’d keep those eyes up,” she said, “and tell me who you are.”

“Atton. Atton Rand. ’Scuse me if I don’t shake hands - the field only causes mild electrical burns.”

“Care to tell me why you’re locked up?”

He waved a hand casually. “Security claimed I violated some trumped-up regulation or another. Take it up with them if you want, but they stopped listening to me shortly before they stopped feeding me. Now _that_ ’s criminal.”

Judging by the stubble on his chin, she guessed he’d been out of the loop at least a cycle or two himself, but even so Careena knew an evasion when she heard one. She let it slide for now. “What is this place?” she asked.

“Hey, you mean you didn’t come here on purpose? Can’t say I blame you. This slice of paradise is the Peragus mining facility, the only supplier of shipping-grade engine fuel to this corner of the galaxy. Now, Peragus fuel plays havoc with engines, but it gets the job done." The prisoner began examining his fingernails. Careena mentally added ‘pilot’ to her list of conclusions. "As long as you don’t mind the toxic byproducts, that is. Oh, and trying to mine it without blowing yourself up.”

“Blowing yourself up?”

“Yeah, this asteroid belt is one giant minefield. One proton torpedo - even a stray blaster shot - can start an explosion that’ll make the one that shattered Peragus II look like a kid’s pop detonator.”

“Peragus II?” prompted the Exile. The room was starting to have an echo.

“You know the planet with the exposed core you saw, flying in? _That_ hole was caused by the _first_ mining station that tried to siphon fuel off the planet. Blew a whole chunk out of the planet and set it drifting halfway to Ruuria in a big clump of fuel-cooled asteroids. So the miners drill the asteroids now, not the planet’s surface. That’s why they don’t allow blasters here - can’t trust a miner jumped up on juma juice not to fire one stray shot that’ll turn the entire colony into a thermal detonator.”

The Exile nodded. It explained a lot about what she'd seen so far. “This facility’s deserted. What happened?”

“You mean before or after that _Jedi_ showed up? Either way, it’s a real short story. See, this Jedi shows up, and you _know_ what that means..."

Careena kept her face carefully blank.

"... because wherever there’s a Jedi, you know the Republic will soon be crawling up your ion engine in no time. But the story gets _better_. See, some of the miners get it into their ferrocrete skills that since the Jedi’s unconscious, they can collect the bounty the Exchange has posted for live Jedi...”

Suddenly, she felt the weight of ten years’ absence, began to realise how much she had missed.

“...and, well, what passes for the law here didn’t like _that_ idea, so the two groups started fighting. Then there was some big explosion, and I was sitting here for a long time, then you showed up in your underwear and things got a lot better.”

Through the yellow glare of the force cage, the prisoner was grinning at her. She'd been miles away, but not as inattentive as Atton Rand seemed to think. She raised an eyebrow and decided to ignore the last comment. “There’s a bounty on captured Jedi? Why?”

“Don’t know much about it,” he shrugged. “Maybe the Exchange wants one as a trophy, or somebody’s got something against Jedi and is looking to collect. Not many Jedi left these days… wouldn’t surprise me if the bounty’s pretty high.”

Alarm gripped Careena's gut. Even after all this time, after the way she’d been cast out, it rattled her to hear the Jedi discussed like rare game. _The Order must've fallen pretty far from its ivory tower._  “What happened to them? The Jedi?”

For the first time, a bite entered Atton Rand’s voice. “The ones that weren’t killed in the Jedi Civil War ended up switching off the 'sabers long ago. Word is, there’s not even a Jedi Council anymore. But who knows?” He didn't quite say 'good riddance', but the implication was clear enough.

“I’d heard rumours of a war,” Careena thought aloud, “but a war between Jedi?”

It made no sense - after all they’d put her through, after all the contempt, for them to turn on each other?

“Yeah, Revan, Malak, and the Jedi that went to join them in the Mandalorian Wars,” nodded Atton. He seemed on firmer ground again. Maybe Kreia had been right about his usefulness. “They turned against the _other_ Jedi and had a scrap that almost laid waste to the galaxy.”

 _Maybe I'm not so uninformed. Of course this is a war I know about - the one I walked away from. The one I was_  turned  _away from._ It was odd. Nine long years had passed since Malachor V, yet she still heard its echo in every detail of Atton's account. He scratched his head and shifted uncomfortably. “Heh, where have you been?” he finished weakly.

“I’ve been… away since the Mandalorian Wars,” she said finally.

“Well I wasn’t there - but like all Sith, Revan and Malak turned on each other. _After_ they turned on the Jedi, of course.”

Something in his phrasing put Careena on her guard. When she left the Republic, the Sith were so dreaded that they were discussed in hushed tones. Atton Rand might have been gossiping about an especially dysfunctional team of swoop racers. It was unsettling.

“I was led to believe Revan saved the Jedi - and the Republic.”

“Well, that was the story,” agreed Atton, chattily. Then he swayed, nearly burning his hand on the forcefield as he steadied himself. With a little surge of sympathy, Careena realised his force cage was too narrow to sit in. He'd been standing here with no food or water for the past two days. Ogling aside, it wasn't surprising that he was so pleased to see her - and probably not at the top of his game. The stumble seemed to irritate him, though. “Look, not like your half-naked interrogation isn’t a personal fantasy of mine, but-"

* * *

Before Atton could ask to be let out, the penny dropped. "Hey, wait a minute. _You’re_ that Jedi the miners were talking about! Where is everybody?”

He immediately felt stupid again, because she'd definitely asked him the same question, but the words were already out of his mouth.

“Don’t _you_ know what happened to them?” she asked coldly.

“From my beautiful view in this security cage? Look, I heard some explosions, some emergency alarms, some toxic gas pouring out of the vents... or at least I'm guessing it was toxic gas given how quiet this place went afterwards... anyway. Maybe none of the miners survived _whatever_ happened. And if they’re all gone…” He smiled in a way that he hoped was disarming. “Look. Hey. Let me out and I can help you. I can. I’ve gotten out of trouble countless times.”

Between the sleep deprivation, the low blood sugar, and two cycles without visiting the fresher, Atton took it as a serious testament to his charm that the Jedi was considering it. “Tell me your plan and we can go from there.”

He smiled. With 'Plan A' gone so spectacularly off the rails, he'd had all this time to think of a way off this two-bit station. Assuming, of course, that his force cage powered down before the facility blew up. Or that he didn't die of thirst before some bureaucrat in the Republic started missing the fuel shipments.

“This facility isn’t a military installation, which means we may have a chance. _You_ shut down this cell’s security field, and _I_ can reroute the emergency systems so we can get to the hangars. We grab a ship and then we fly out of here.”

Atton made an expansive gesture, like a magician inviting applause, and he discreetly checked her out again. Jedi or not, he could think of a couple more elements that would make this plan even more attractive. The Jedi didn't seem dazzled by his plan - the part he'd voiced, that is - but after a moment she nodded. It was pretty weird that she didn't know about the bounty, no matter how far away she'd been, but for all her questions... Atton had met more Jedi in his time than he'd ever admit, but this one didn't strike him as some cloistered Academy ingenue. There was a hardness to her, and a quiet authority that came from  _command_. 

“One thing first,” she said. She lingered by the security controls and fixed him with an sharp look. “The patients in the medical bay were killed by a lethal dose of sedatives. Know anything about that?”

“Huh?" Atton blinked. That was no mining accident - it sounded like straight murder. Whatever else had gone wrong on this ship, it definitely didn't sound like his contact's doing. "What are you talking about?”

The Jedi shook her head dismissively. “Nothing. I trust you. Let's get you out of that cage and we can work together to get out of this mess.” 

* * *

Folding stiffly into a seat at the command console, Atton chattered happily about drift charts and automatic transmissions. “Pure pazaak,” he muttered. He’d made short work of the admin terminal’s security system.

His face was bathed in the flickering light of the navigation screens, and the man seemed genuinely at ease for the first time in their brief acquaintance. _Definitely a pilot,_ thought Careena. _A scoundrel pilot, used to shady cargo._

For someone who didn't work here, he certainly knew a lot about the station’s navisystem and comms protocols. The Exile wasn't sure just what had brought him to Peragus, but she doubted it had been an official invitation - and if her guesses were right, it didn't make sense for a smuggler to fly into a minefield unless the payoff made it seriously worthwhile. That said, if Atton hadn’t been truly surprised to realise _she_ was the prize Jedi, then he was one of the best actors Careena had ever met.

Actor or not, Atton's fraction of a plan hadn't accounted for the extra obstacles of a total lockdown, but in a stroke of luck, Careena managed to hail a utility droid on the hangar floor and tasked it with unsealing the command deck. Until then, Atton seemed happy to relax. Lounging in the navigator’s chair, he cracked his shoulders and stretched theatrically. Careena had a pretty good idea of what was coming next: she'd come across plenty of Attons over the years, from the Academy to the edge of the galaxy. The smart mouth, easy arrogance and brazen roving eye - they all belonged to the kind of man who was _just_ good-looking enough to win girls over without learning trivialities like charm or subtlety.

“Sooo, how long have you been a Jedi?” he drawled. It had the ill-fitting smack of a line used too many times before. “Must be tough. Y’know. No family. No husband…?”

Perched beside the comms console, Careena stretched out too. “No tougher than enduring false sympathy while you’re staring at my chest,” she sighed.

Atton frowned and sat up, but before he could respond there came a string of bleeps from the console, and a line began to flash on the ship’s plan above his head. “Hey, what do you know - that little cargo cylinder came through.”

“Looks like it,” said Careena. “Odd that he didn’t contact us on the comms, though.” 

Atton rubbed his neck and stood up. “Whatever he did, if he got the turbolifts working then we should have clear run to the hangar.”

The Exile shook her head. “The turbolifts are locked down manually. I had him open the emergency hatch.”

“W-wait. Don’t tell me you’re taking that hatch down into the mining tunnels… are you? That explosion came from _below_. There’s probably nothing left down there except superheated rock and collapsed blast tunnels. You’d be an idiot to go down there!”

“Maybe. But it’s the only way out, and it’s better I risk my life than yours.”

The pilot shook his head again. “You’re either really brave or _really_ crazy. Or both. All right, I’ll keep an eye on things from up here - the only things moving down there are mining droids, so don’t be playing hero too hard.” He cleared his throat quickly. “Uh, not that I care what happens to you or anything. I just don’t wanna be trying to get off this rock by myself.”

Careena pulled up a schematic on the navscreen and did her best to study it. Atton rummaged through the console's compartments for some comms tech.

“I’ll keep a comlink open. I may be able to guide you through the tunnels from up here. Don’t know if the signal will hold once you get too deep, but I'll hail you if I see anything on this end... uh...”

He hovered awkwardly as he handed her the earpiece. The Exile smiled. "Careena. My name is Careena."

She hooked the comlink to her ear, gave Atton a nod, and loped towards the door. _If this guy's working with bounty hunters, he is completely terrible at it._ But whatever his angle, she felt the pilot’s eyes on her until she rounded the corner out of sight. 


End file.
